The “Revolution of 1959” and its prequel

 One of the more striking features of the history of English cricket is that:

• before the late 1950s, slow bowlers usually headed the averages and especially the wicket totals
  
• since that time, almost no spinners have headed the averages, and no England-qualified spinner has done so since Derek Underwood in the 1970s
• in fact, from 1900 to 1958 a spin bowler was leading wicket taker in 38 of 49 seasons, whereas since 1959 an England-qualified spinner has been leading wicket taker only six times
  
• from 1900 to 1958 spin bowlers headed the averages in over half of all seasons, whereas only Derek Underwood and Don Shepherd — neither classic slow spinners — have done so as an England-qualified spinner since
  

The transition can be clearly seen from looking at the leading bowlers both by averages and wickets taken.

For a long time, I have referred to this change as the “Revolution of 1959”, as it was that summer that spin bowlers ceased gaining their formerly large wicket totals due to increased covering of pitches.  David Green in his 2001 ‘Back to Grass Roots’ viewed — not unfairly in my mind — full covering as a blatant rigging of pitches against the spin bowler, and argued that commercial interests were the reason behind covering. However, Green did not mention who actually is responsible — television broadcasters for whom the amount of spin bowling seen before the late 1950s would limit advertising opportunities and revenue since there would be much smaller breaks for advertisements between balls.

The “Revolution of 1959” was financially disastrous for first-class county cricket. Without attacking spin bowling to give opportunities for free strokes by batsmen even at the risk of losing their wicket, attendances at county matches — which as fast bowling strengthened and rival attractions to cricket developed declined by fifty percent between 1947 and 1957 — would by 1990 free-fall to a mere one-thirteenth of their 1947 peak as spin became insignificant to the strategy of the game. This created a vicious circle as first-class cricket became subsidised by one-day cricket, where the need to not give away runs excludes the buy-at-all-costs spinner so critical to first-class cricket being self-supporting.

However, what I have come to realise is that short-sighted policies by English cricket authorities had already prequelled the “Revolution of 1959” before that season. Most especially, a standard 75-yard [68.58 metre] boundary was introduced in 1957. The hope was that shortening boundaries would encourage big hitting, but instead they encouraged even more defensive pace and seam bowling, mutually exclusive to self-supporting first-class cricket, and hastened the death of the crowd-attracting wrist-spinner.

In 1958, a summer notorious for dreadful weather and an appalling New Zealand team who averaged fewer than twelve and a half runs per wicket in five Tests, what one finds studying closely is that the “Revolution” was already underway despite only marginally increased pitch covering. Despite the success of Tony Lock and Jim Laker in the Tests, and Lock still being the leading first-class wicket-taker, only five spin bowlers took 100 wickets. Contrariwise, as recently as 1955 eighteen spin bowlers had done so. Moreover, the New Zealand team — in some respect a few years ahead of England in cricketing trends — was so weak in spin that it completely failed to exploit ideal pitches in the Old Trafford and Oval Tests.

With hindsight I think that England could possibly have learned more from this New Zealand team than from any other tourist in history. What New Zealand were doing — especially overgrassing pitches and excluding spin bowlers — seems to have been unconsciously copied by England with a lag of several years. The result is that late 1980s England teams remind me of the 1958 New Zealanders — to paraphrase Kyle Wright, “they were bad and they were boring”.

What I have noted today is that commentator Denys Rowbotham had indeed noted the unusual success of pace bowlers in 1958 in his description of the season in the Guardian, which I will show below:

Description of the 1958 English cricket season by Denys Rowbotham from the Guardian, 17 September 1958

It is fair to say that Rowbotham has overlooked that the prominence of pacemen in the averages compared to previous wet summers may be substantially due to an unusually high quality of English pace bowling. Also, artificial drying may have helped pacemen gain a foothold on wet ground.

However, what I have discovered but which not noticed until later is how experimental rules — and, very likely, changes in pitch preparation like the use of “dressings” [pesticides] to kill “worms” [insect larvae] — were already causing a revolution in English bowling even compared to a few seasons previously. Already in 1955 Wisden was already noting a decline in wrist-spin bowling and a related decline in attendances. Although Wisden only once (1961) made an explicit link between the two, the correlation between declining wrist-spin and declining attendance is striking both in England and outside.

There is no doubt that the “Revolution of 1959” produced a transformation in English cricket history — necessitating the birth of the modern “instant” game as the attacking spinners essential to longer forms of the sport being self-supporting disappeared. The figures tabulated above clearly illustrate its effects, and today the game played beforehand is lost to history and seldom talked about after those journalists brought up in the interwar years died out. Yet, I have always found something romantic about the county game as it was played before the late 1950s — a sport requiring much less athleticism and much more endurance and technical skill than sports played today under the hegemony of television. It is possible that I romanticise it too much given the abysmal failure on Australian pitches of almost every English spin bowler of this era, but it is an interest I have not lost ever three decades.